 |
| Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi will represent Australia in the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026. (ABC Radio Sydney: Declan Bowring) |
By Hannah Story
When Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi visited the Venice Biennale last year, he picked up a white stone from outside the Australia Pavilion.
He put the stone in his pocket and took it home with him, where it now sits in his studio in Western Sydney.
"In our culture, you take something with you off the land and hold it and promise to return," he tells ABC Arts.
He'll be back to return the stone soon: he's just been announced as Australia's representative at the Venice Biennale, the so-called 'Olympics of the art world', in 2026.
When Sabsabi visited Venice, on a whirlwind one-day trip while he was completing a residency in Rome, he was still working on his application, with curator Michael Dagostino.
"While we were writing the application, I said to [Michael], 'Brother, man, we're gonna get this and I've got this stone, this pebble, that will return here with me'," Sabsabi says.
 |
| Sabsabi and Dagostino first worked together in 1998, when the artist was featured in his first exhibition: Arab Made at Casula Powerhouse in Sydney. (Supplied: Anna Kucera) |
He follows Bigambul and Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore, who, in 2024, became the first Australian to wil top art prize at Venice, the Golden Lion, for his word kith and kin, which mapped his ancestry over 2,400 generations.
"[Moore's win was] a landmark for all of us collectively," Sabsabi says.
"We're honoured to be following that. It was an important work for that time and place. And now we're building on that momentum."
Making nurturing art
It's the latest in a spate of achievements over his 35-year career making video, mixed media and installation art, and exhibiting in more than 90 solo and group exhibitions in Australia and around the world.
While Sabsabi and Dagostino are tight-lipped about what exactly audiences can expect from their presentation at the Biennale, Sabsabi says the intention is for the work to be "inclusive" and "nurturing", and to "bring people together".
"The world is becoming much more polarised at the moment," Dagostino says. "With this polarisation, there's a lack of understanding about other people's experience and a lack of empathy.
"Hopefully this work can bring people together that might have different viewpoints, but who will come together to have this experience where they're trying to understand the other person's position."
While Sabsabi acknowledges the thought of the Biennale can be overwhelming, he appreciates how the event allows work by artists from around the world to sit in conversation with each other.
"Conversations have got to sit within a global narrative. You can't sit in isolation," he says.
Hip hop meets the art world
Born in Tripoli, Lebanon, Sabsabi fled the country's civil war to settle in Australia when he was 12.
Growing up in Western Sydney in the 80s, he encountered a lot of racism. It's an experience that led him to hip hop music.
"Hip hop was an alternative to the way things were at the time," he told ABC Radio National's The Art Show in 2024.
Sabsabi would listen to Double J and record hip hop songs he liked onto tape, later swapping them with other fans.
He was especially drawn to socially and politically aware lyrics by artists like Public Enemy, as well as to its rhythmic beats, which he associated with Arabic percussion.
"It broadened access for me to people like Malcolm X, Black Panther Party [and] Huey P. Newton and all these Afro-American scholars that weren't taught in school," he said.
"Reading and listening to them, their views of the world, I could relate to those and I felt they represented me."
 |
| Sabsabi in his studio in Bonnyrigg in Western Sydney in 2018. (ABC Arts: Ken Leanfore) |
He started performing in Sydney's hip hop scene as Peacefender, turning his garage into a studio and hanging out with a collective of rappers mostly from First Nations and Middle Eastern backgrounds.
But their home was fire-bombed — an experience that inflected his art as Sabsabi extended his practice from hip hop into visual art in the 90s.
"It made things more urgent in terms of what you need to say and what you need to do," he said.
"I genuinely feel that I have a responsibility to be socially engaged and open platforms for conversations to be had, even if they're difficult. That's the only way we can move ahead and gain momentum and grow together as a society."
Art for this moment
Sabsabi returned to Lebanon in 2001, his first visit since he moved to Australia as a child. Then he learned about Sufism, or tasawwuf, the mystical dimension of Islam, as well as about the ongoing repercussions of the civil war.
"[Tasawwuf is] about opening doors to offer invitations for others to take on this knowledge. As human beings, we don't understand everything … There is still a great mystery," he told The Art Show.
"Since then, I've incorporated those possibilities into my work … For me, art is an expression of who you are."
While Sabsabi's experiences in Lebanon have profoundly shaped his work, he hasn't been able to visit the country since before the pandemic — first because of COVID-19 and then the war in Lebanon.
"As a human being, as a Lebanese [person], as an Arab, as a Muslim, as an Australian, what's been happening is inhumane and unacceptable," he says.
"This violence, destruction cannot be sustained. We need a way forward for all of us to co-exist and to respect the rights of Palestinian people and their right of return to their lands and culture.
"We have tough skin but we do get bruised. How can you not be affected when you have family, when you have friends [in Lebanon]?"
Sabsabi and his family even had tickets booked to travel to Lebanon after his residency in Rome, but their flights were cancelled due to the war.
"I talk publicly and openly about my traumatic childhood memories of civil war and destruction," the artist tells ABC Arts.
"But I wouldn't want my kids to grow up with those memories."
First published at ABC News, February 7, 2025
No comments:
Post a Comment